I recently had the opportunity to ride Washington DC’s Metrorail system. I first rode it the year it opened (1976), and as a child of  nearby central Maryland, recall taking the Red Line to the Bicentennial Celebration on July 4th on the National Mall (we parked remotely and used the line to get in, I think we walked back to the car). I was 9, and it seemed the future, all modern and sterile.

Now it is the past’s version of the future, modern in a post-modern age, dim and decaying, and still sterile.

My subjective impressions are such that it is a system I avoid, taking it only from the airport to my hotel when I am in DC for a meeting or conference.

From a simply sensory perspective, it makes me feel nauseous in a way that other similarly aged systems (BART, MARTA) never did, much less more modern light rail lines or other older subways (London, New York, Paris). I don’t know what it is about the acceleration and braking, the wobble to the left and right, but it is just unsettling. I have not actually lost it on the Metro, but damn I am relieved to get off.

It also has a distinct smell, and unlike Bobby Duvall’s claim of Napalm, it is not the smell of victory. All cities have characteristic odors. Blindfolded you can often know if you are in Washington, New York, San Francisco, or Minneapolis. My memories of DC are tainted by the parfum d’Metro.

The  delays, in large part due to a recent crash maintenance and repair program, have not affected me as a non-resident, but I can imagine this would be infuriating to locals.

WMATA Hot-take: Maintenance problem that caused 1 fire 1 day, but didn’t for weeks or months before that, is unlikely to cause one tomorrow.

— David M. Levinson (@trnsprtst) March 15, 2016

Maybe we should coin the term “maintenance theater”

— David M. Levinson (@trnsprtst) March 15, 2016

Sure safety first, but one has the impression of Maintenance Theater about the way this was rolled out, shutting the entire system one day, rather than one line a day with appropriate substitute Metrobus service. I suppose it worked as such, and certainly Washingtonians are now resigned to this. It’s too bad it couldn’t be properly maintained all along, but that is the general problem we historically nomadic humans have, maintenance is not in our collective genetic or cultural memory. We build, we abandon, we move, repeat.

Once you live long enough, you see the new futuristic things of your youth fade into decline. Infrastructure, unlike life, does not self-renew. It requires humans to be the hand-maidens who bring about renewal. And in modern human culture we prize the new, not the renewed. Infrastructure generally doesn’t get too much attention. When it does, the ribbon-cutting is “above the fold” in newspaper-speak. Catastrophic failures are, in a bad way, too. But the politician always claims credit for the ribbon-cutting and shifts blame for the failure. Changing the culture to prize maintenance and punish the acquisition of new toys until the existing ones are cared for is a shift for the ages. I don’t see how it is promulgated, though conferences like The Maintainers and groups liks Strong Towns seem to be trying.

Janet Moore in the Star Tribune writes Goodbye, Car2Go; what’s next for car-sharing? She quotes the blog:

 

After Car2go’s announcement, University of Minnesota Prof. David Levinson wrote in his Transportist blog that in order for car-sharing to work, “access costs must be low, generating demand, which will increase vehicle availability (as suppliers respond to demand), which will lower access costs, which will increase demand.”

Levinson said that the existing Car2Go fleet could have accommodated more customers (Car2Go has 400 vehicles and about 29,000 members in the Twin Cities). He also points out that with gas prices so low and the economy relatively strong, people can readily drive and buy their own cars.

See the original post: Car2Gone: On the decline of Carsharing in the late 2010s.

While many click-bait articles have headlines that claim using public transportation has a significant impact on health, a University of Minnesota study, which explored the correlation between transit and public health, found that there was no significant evidence showing that using public transit improves health.

“For the last 10-15 years, people have been saying they want people to be walking or using transit because there is a significant health benefit,” said David Levinson, University transportation studies senior research associate and co-author of the study.

“It may or may not be true, but it’s a very weak correlation.”

There is an idea that commuters are a more healthy population due to the fact that they use public transit, Levinson said.

Transit is often associated with walking or biking. Previous studies have found that citizens in areas with more transit options have a lower BMI.

But using BMI for that conclusion doesn’t account for commuters who may eat fast food every day or substitute buses and trains for walking from place to place, Levinson said.

Ultimately, the researchers found transit did not have a significant impact on public health.

Alireza Ermagun, University urban and regional planning Ph.D. candidate  [sic – he got a PhD in Civil Engineering, he was also a MURP] research assistant and co-author of the study, said he wanted to point out problems with associating insignificant correlations to data and making assumptions not backed up by sufficient research.

Researchers often rely on data they already have to draw conclusions because research is expensive and difficult to compile, he said.

For example, the researchers analyzed the height of transit users relative to their location because other researchers often correlate travel method and body mass index. They found that people were shorter in locations like cities, where transit was more readily available.

This could justify the claim that transit makes you shorter, he said.

“People are too quick to use these results to draw conclusions,” Levinson said.

But Ermagun said he hopes this study will caution future researchers from making assumptions about their data based on exaggerated connections.

“The result of this study helps people gain a clearer view,” he said. “It allows them to put these resources in a more effective direction.”

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, [ed. note, apparently a real person] sociology assistant professor, said researchers often try to narrow down one specific way to improve public health.

“There is a lot of tendency in the topic of health to focus endlessly on things that actually make a small difference,” she said. “Like exactly what fruit we should be eating or what exercise we should be doing.”

Instead, Wrigley-Field said promoting larger-scale research would be a more efficient means to improving health through initiatives like reducing air pollution, combating poverty and eliminating food insecurity.

“The relative lack of attention to these topics isn’t a lack of knowledge,” she said, “but a lack of political will to talk about them.”

Oliver Moore at the Globe and Mail writes “Dynamic tolling could be the key to ease congestion while raising money“. The money quote is below:

Still, the consensus from people who study tolling is that what Toronto is discussing now has the potential to be a good start.

“I’d view it as sort of a phased thing, and this is the first step,” said David Levinson, a transportation analyst and professor in the civil engineering faculty at the University of Minnesota, who has researched road pricing. “It’s much easier to move from a toll to a toll with differentiated time of day prices than it is to move from no toll to tolling.”